Enterprises as well as individuals are becoming increasingly dependent on computers. As more and more data are generated, the need for efficient and reliable data backup storage systems is increasing. There are a variety of systems in existence today, utilizing both local and network storage for backup. Some of these storage systems use data segmentation and deduplication to more efficiently store the data. Deduplicating backup systems break an incoming data stream into a series of data segments and test the system for the presence of each data segment before storing it, in order to avoid storing it multiple times. Some deduplicating backup systems can achieve high data compression factors of 10 to 50 or more. However, for a large enterprise system, a backup system compressed by deduplication can still be so large as to be cumbersome.